Dinosaur bones and modern art: visiting museums with kids

Thu 13 October 2016

13 mins

While dinosaur skeletons will always be a drawcard, museums and art galleries these days provide a range of different tactile experiences and activities for kids. This week’s Screen Free Challenge theme is CULTURE and we caught up with Linda Sproul, the manager of Education and Community Programs at Museum Victoria. As a child, she was fascinated by the Portugese man o’war - aka the blue bottle. Seeing such creatures in museums prompt kids to think about the world around them and ask questions like “Where does it live? What does it do? Why is it like that?”

You can read books, watch movies and research animals on devices, but Linda says that actually being in the same space as life-sized museum artefacts, like dinosaur and whale skeletons, helps kids get a sense of scale and time.

While you might think you’re just going to a museum to look at old stuff, it’s also about the time you share with your loved ones. “Conversations that people have with one another actually forms memory, understanding, and creates empathy, and creates a broader sense of the world and what your place is in it, and how you might want to be in the world,” says Linda.

And of course museum staff are experts at answering all those tricky why, how and what questions that might spring to those young minds. Maybe your little humans will get inspired to become archaeologists, scientists, artists, historians or even taxidermists!

Around Australia, each state has it’s own museum covering the dinosaur and natural history bases, plus exhibitions of local Indigenous culture, local history, and often science exhibits. Then there are the state galleries of classical and modern art, too. We’ve put together a list below, and we’d love to find out your favourites. Which museums and galleries do you like to visit?

This week, we have two challenge ideas for you. You could head to a museum or gallery and take a pic of yourself with a dinosaur or a work of art and upload it with the hashtag #screenfreechallenge #kinderling

The second challenge idea comes from Linda. Choose an object that is precious to you and share a story about it with someone in your family or a close friend.

ACT

Questacon is the National Science and Technology Centre in the nation’s capital. Famous as the go-to school excursion location, it’s also lots of fun to visit as a family.